MODEC: an unsupervised clustering method integrating omics data for identifying cancer subtypes

The identification of cancer subtypes can help researchers understand hidden genomic mechanisms, enhance diagnostic accuracy and improve clinical treatments. With the development of high-throughput techniques, researchers can access large amounts of data from multiple sources. Because of the high dimensionality and complexity of multiomics and clinical data, research into the integration of multiomics data is needed, and developing effective tools for such purposes remains a challenge for researchers. In this work, we proposed an entirely unsupervised clustering method without harnessing any prior knowledge (MODEC). We used manifold optimization and deep-learning techniques to integrate multiomics data for the identification of cancer subtypes and the analysis of significant clinical variables. Since there is nonlinearity in the gene-level datasets, we used manifold optimization methodology to extract essential information from the original omics data to obtain a low-dimensional latent subspace. Then, MODEC uses a deep learning-based clustering module to iteratively define cluster centroids and assign cluster labels to each sample by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss. MODEC was applied to six public cancer datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas database and outperformed eight competing methods in terms of the accuracy and reliability of the subtyping results. MODEC was extremely competitive in the identification of survival patterns and significant clinical features, which could help doctors monitor disease progression and provide more suitable treatment strategies.